Lo que construimos

One fantastic resource for authentic Spanish music is Zachary Jones’s site, Zambombazo. Last month, he posted a worksheet for a Natalia Lafourcade song, Lo que construimos. The song itself is a beautifully sad breakup song, but the music video adds that something extra that makes for compelling CI: a twist ending. I decided to combine Embedded Reading techniques with Movie Talk strategies, creating two block periods worth of activities. My students were able to do this right after a dating/personal hygiene unit, so there is lots of vocabulary that I decided to recycle into the final reading.

Target Structures:
se acabó

tenía que acabar

After presenting the target structures, I showed students screencaps from the video and we read and discussed the story together.

After discussing the story, we listened to the song WITHOUT the video in order to complete the cloze of the lyrics and then discussed the meaning.

The next day, we watched the video, pausing many times to discuss the action, as in Movie Talk. For the first time, students noticed there was something strange about this boyfriend. What was that strange substance tracked throughout the house? Who is he talking about when he said “they have come for me?” What is that strange light shining down in the end? Is the boyfriend entirely human?

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2 thoughts on “Lo que construimos”

I love it! This will be perfect for my 2nd years. Did you notice the translation of the William Carlos William poem, “This Is Just to Say” on the computer screen? Now I’ve got to figure out if there are more literary allusions hidden in the video.

Thanks! I did notice that, and spent a couple minutes in “English teacher mode” because I love that poem. I even added the plums into the final reading as the alien’s favorite food (as well as why that fridge was so bare)!